１．担当ＰＭ

　Alan　Kay （President, Viewpoints Research Institute）

２．採択者氏名

３．プロジェクト管理組織

　有限会社アカデミア

４．委託金支払額

　6,692,633円

５．テーマ名

　SqueakBasket - An experimental email environment for sharing objects -

６．関連Webサイト

　http://squeakbasket.org/swiki/

７．テーマ概要

 
　This project aims to develop an email environment for Squeak. It is an abstract concept for sharing objects not dependent on special devices or storage systems. It is a proposed environment for the publishing and subscribing of “Etoy projects” or “morphs” as email. This email environment would enable people to share objects without the use of web servers as well as provide a simple user interface environment and “real rich mail”.

８．採択理由（担当PM）

　This is an excellent and timely proposal. It will both advance the state of the art of human-human communication, and of media authoring tools for computers. The proposal is well written and the project seems quite doable.

９．成果

　The idea behind SqueakBasket is a good one. It draws from the old Xerox Star idea that you shouldn't have to have a separate email client, files, etc., but that all documents should be under the same principles of organization and editing. Thus, any document can be dragged and dropped on an "Out basket" which will cause the document headers to be read to find to whom it should be sent. SqueakBasket proposes to do this with any Squeak end-user object.

　 The work done on this project was extensive, and involved implementing many approaches to solving the user-interface problems to allow end-users to gracefully and easily use this facility.

　The researcher was very thoughtful about the experiments and sought the advice of others.

１０．プロジェクト評価

　The biggest difficulty with this project was to wind up with a user interface design that was powerful enough to be useful but simple to learn and use. I think the researcher learned many things, and would have an even better result the next time this kind of design is attempted. Perhaps the most distraction in this design process was provided by existing email interfaces, none of which are very good.

１１．今後の課題

　It might have been better to just forget about email as a design metaphor and concentrate on what it might mean to send objects to others.